Jenny Delasalle's blog

On 29th Oct ’13 I went to a talk on citizen science and crowdsourcing in science and industry at the Humboldt University. A rough translation of the title is “achieve more together”, and it was delivered by Elisa Herrmann, in German. It’s one of the BBK series of seminars on information science themes at Humboldt’s department for information science (some are in German, some in English).

I love the German word “Schwarmintelligenz” for wisdom of the crowd, especially in the context of the German mosquito mapping site that Herrmann gave as an example of a citizen science project!

I’ve been rather remiss in not blogging about this talk sooner, but I believe it’s “better late than never”, and I can point here to some other things on the theme of crowdsourcing that I’ve noticed since then.

– attitudes to crowdfunding among business angels and venture capitalists;
– which universities have successfully used crowdfunding and for what reasons;
– which platforms are offering turnkey solutions that foster universities with crowdfunding;
– how crowdfunding is being used by organisations like the University of Edinburgh and the RSA
– what crowdfunding has done for student entrepreneurs at universities like Plymouth, Bristol and Bournemouth

The Times Higher Education reported on this event, and some names worth googling from the programme are : Professor Alan Barrell of the University of Cambridge; the UK Crowdfunding Association; CrowdMission; Crowdcure; Microryza; Syndicate Room; Crowdcube; Sponsorcraft; Seedrs; Crowdshed; the UK Business Angels Association; Joe Cox of the University of Portsmouth; and Midven.

Back to the talk at Humboldt, which was not really about crowd funding but focussed more on the citizen science model. Elisa Herrmann explained that the benefits of crowdsourcing can include:

a source of investment in terms of cash, expertise or resource,

engaging with the public (which would include the alumni mentioned by the crowdfunding conference page)